CityWar

Overview

In CityWar multiple factions fight for control of a city divided into regions. The setting is in an already developed world with an oppressive government regime. Various factions/corporations trade and fight with each other while avoiding the wrath of the police. A trade simulation underpins the economy and unit production in the game, allowing factions to fight economically as well as with military force.

Main Inspirations:

• top down shooter mechanics similar to GTA2 or Running With Rifles
• economic trade simulation of the X series
• city development from Civilization
• RTS combat and strategic zoom like Supreme Commander or Eugen games.

Note: This game is in a pre alpha stage currently and major game mechanics are liable to change or are missing entirely.

Any bugs, comments, suggestions please feel free to send via email to [email protected] with "CityWar" in the subject line.

Basic Controls

The game has two control modes, Top Down Shooter (TDS) and Real Time Strategy (RTS). Use Tab and "P" to transition between them (details below). In TDS mode you control one individual unit, in RTS mode you are the commander of your faction issuing commands to all units.

Currently I haven't created the UI to see and rebind controls (though the backend mostly supports this). Here is a hopefully somewhat up to date listing of controls:

Common Controls

• tab -- switch between TDS and RTS
• p -- possess or unpossess single unit. also switches control mode.
• scroll wheel to zoom. zoom out far enough to view faction ownership overlay.
• escape - main pause menu to exit / restart game
• Spacebar - active pause, you can still give orders here

Topdown Shooter (TDS) Mode Controls

• WASD to move
• F - Use key. Used to enter vehicles and interact with other things like buildings.
• Middle mouse + drag -- rotate camera
• V : change camera mode -- Centered on player, centered on mouse, between camera + mouse
• shift - center view on cursor
• number keys - switch weapon
• alt + number keys - use support ability
• Press t while near allies to order them to follow you.
• When dead you turn into a soul, click on another npc to possess their body.
• When alive, press backslash "\" to release control of your body and turn into a soul.
• When dead, press backslash "\" to spawn a body for yourself. (CHEAT)

Real Time Strategy (RTS) Mode Controls

Basics: Click to select unit, shift + click to add to selection. Right click to give order to current selection.

Zoom is important! Zoom out to see unit icons a la supreme commander. Zoom out further to see region overlay with new capital icons. select the region capital icons to bring up the region menu.

• Middle mouse + drag -- pan map
• WASD - pan map
• alt + Middle mouse + drag -- rotate camera map
• p -- possess, take control of selected unit and switch to TDS mode
• u -- unload, tell selected vehicle to unload it's passengers. Hold shift to also unload the driver.
• f -- follow. Center view on currently selected unit. Hold shift to continually follow unit
• i -- info. Use this to bring up the menu of current unit or building. Hold shift+i to bring up a secondary unit info menu. Useful for transferring wares between units via click+drag.

More Controls

• Middle mouse + drag -- rotate camera.
• Escape - Pause menu
• F1 - Faction Property -- Display list of all Units and Buildings belonging to you
• F2 - Trade Listings -- Display listing of all wares being offered for trade.
• F3 - Faction Relation Window
• F4 - Metrics Window
• Spacebar - pause game
• F6 - Extra Slow motion
• F7 - Slow motion
• F8 - Normal Speed
• F9 - Hide show overlay options (when zoomed out in city scene)
• F11 - Hide GUI
• F12 - Restart

Cheats & Debug Commands

• k - kill selected units. (shift kills player and vehicle, no shift kills player OR vehicle)
• m - give money to faction
• , - give ammo
• . - give health. hold alt to make invincible.
• / - give all weapons
• h - give all required resources to first item in build queue for selected factory
• n - instantly finish selected factory current construction
• c - force convert selected units to player faction
• Shift+F10 - quit.
• alt + j - capture current region (todo: does this stil work?)

Skillbar

Access the skill bar items positionally with (alt + number key) in TDS mode or just regular click in RTS mode. This then prompts a click to place the ability. The economy for these isn't implemented yet so you just have a fixed non replenishing amount. Currently there is:

• Plasma Artillery
• Rocket Artillery
• Airdrop Tank
• Airdrop APC
• Airdrop Car
• Place Small Turret
• Place single infantry (basically a cheat to respawn when dead)

Economy

The latest enhancement (as of v0.5) has been a much more complicated economic system, inspired by X4. Resources are faction global, most notably are credits. Wares are produced and stored physically in the game world by factories. Factories have a set of recipes available to them that take input wares and resources. They can produce more wares, new building facilities, or create units on the map.

Resources

Resources are faction global

• Credits - used to buy things
• Manpower - humans and training for them
• Nanites - not used for anything yet. Will be used for advanced tech, easy conversion to any other ware, ammo, and research.
• Population - limiter of amount of units on the field

Buildings

• Every building is constructable with one exception -- the Train Importer. Importers are the source of wares into the game economy.
• Buildings can be captured by standing on the circular control point. Beware capturing buildings will anger the owner. A growing pie circle should indicate progress
• Buildings are composed from facilities. Facilities have a slot type which determines what else can be built next to it. A unique facility must be alone. Ground floor and penthouse facilities occupy the lowest or highest floors exclusively, and standard can be built anywhere.
• An empty square with the capture point in the middle with the hammer icon is an empty building plot. Nothing has been built yet.
• select a building in rts mode and press “I” or double click to open the building menu. The tabs on the left let you interact with the various facilities on a building. Use the construction center to build new facilities.

Consumer Goods

Besides just building units of war, you can also produce consumer goods at the metal foundry. These can then be sold to retail stores (Consumer Retail), which then sell them to the AI civilians. They are sold in 2 ways: 1) visibly in the 3d world to the civilians walking around, and 2) invisibly everywhere at a steady rate. This is a major source for credits into the game economy. You can also earn a profit by participating in a portion of the supply chain, as there will always be demand for consumer goods.

Regions and Taxes

Regions can be captured by controlling the majority of buildings within a region. If you own a region you are paid taxes derived from the total economic activity in the region called Wealth. Beware that conflict increases Disorder.

Factions & The AI

AI is a work in progress. Your player faction runs the same AI as the other main factions. Press "F1" to access the faction menu. Here you can change automation settings to allow or prevent the AI from automatically building buildings/units as well as automatically assigning orders to existing ones. If told to, the AI will auto-build units and buildings, as well as automatically assign units to tasks and try to defend itself and expand its territory. When you right click give a unit an order it will temporarily override the faction AI, but when it completes its task it will go back to being automatically managed if that option is selected.

There are three Types of Factions, "normal", civilian (grey), and police(dark purple). You start as the blue faction, with just a single infantry unit. Good Greens and Evil Reds already exist on the map. Evil reds hate you. 

The civilian faction has infinite resources. Also civilians will spawn from residences.

Police are dark purple and angering them will give you notoriety. Police will dispatch hit squads to seek out the highest notoriety target. Notoriety will decay over time. Note that police are absent from the two cities map currently. However all factions now individually maintain a bounty hunter system that works identically to police notoriety.

Using the faction menu you can also choose what faction you are controlling.

Known Bugs

• Some controls / commands may not check if you are the owner faction before issuing the command. Consider it a free cheat until I fix them all.
• AI "don't build infantry" automation control isn't hooked up yet.
• Sometimes removing an item from the build queue will cause an error. Hard to reproduce.
• With lots of units (>100) active at once the pathfinding slows down and starts to queue. Units will either stop or walk into walls while waiting for pathfinding to complete.
• Physics interactions between vehicles and pedestrian is weird.
• vehicle pathfinding sometimes gets stuck, vehicles can get flipped. 
• when units are on top of an empty lot when a building is built they sometimes get pushed to the side correctly but also sometimes get stuck in strange places. just kill them
• Turrets & vehicles don't check whats in front of them when firing so may try to fire through buildings etc

Any bugs, comments, suggestions please feel free to send via email to [email protected] with "CityWar" in the subject line.